Society, economy & sport

Birth of Jane Goodall

3 April 1934

Jane Goodall was born on 3 April 1934 in Hampstead. An English primatologist and anthropologist, Goodall began studying wild chimpanzees at Gombe in Tanzania in 1960, at the urging of the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, when she had no formal degree. She observed that chimpanzees make and use tools, hunt, and have complex social bonds and personalities, which overturned the belief that tool use was unique to humans. She later completed a doctorate at Cambridge. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots and Shoots youth program, and spent decades traveling the world campaigning for conservation, animal welfare and environmental protection. She was named a UN Messenger of Peace.

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